Return to ChaGaau Pt1

1. Coromandel and Otago
Hong Kong’s hills remind me,
Mt Te Aroha, I thought was China
At the age of three.

2. Tong saan is Cantonese for China
Descendants of Tang it means,
For mountain, saan is homonym
Hence confusing childhood scenes

3. My words return to mock me
For oft did I say at three,
“I am going to go to China”
Now is real irony

A few years later when we moved from Te Aroha to Auckland, and went to Sunday School, We had a Sunday School teacher whose uncle had been a missionary with the China Inland Mission, Whenever we sang the hymn “From Greenland’s icy mountains” we were reminded “to deliver their land from error's chain”.

How ironic that my brother who wanted to become a missionary to China never got there, whereas I who didn’t want to be a missionary have been back more times than I can remember. Perhaps I can regard my trips as pilgrimages made on his behalf.

This is an account of my latest trip to the village of Cha Gaau 槎窖, where Chan Lay Yung (our father’s niece and our closest surviving relative) still lives.

I wanted to go back to Cha Gaau 槎窖 by myself to make sure that I knew the way, for the time when my nieces wanted to go there. (I like studying maps so I hate not knowing how to get to a place and must know where I have been) The last time I went was with Pui Yam’s father being sandwiched between him and the motorcycle driver, again hanging on like grim death and couldn’t take note of many landmarks. So I wanted to walk for the exercise and because I think more creatively when I walk.

From Ferry Pier (at top left) to Cha Gaau (槎窖) Vllge Rest Area (left of letter “G” of Google)

From SunTong 新塘 (New Pond) to Cha Gaau 槎窖, it is necessary to cross the Dong Jiang (東江East River) by ferry. Crossing the river brought a flashback from my childhood. My new found cousin Pui Yam (pron. Poy Yum and hereafter abbrev to PY) took me on his motorbike to the ferry pier but when I went to pay the fare, I was told, “We don’t accept loos!”.

Loo is an expression I hadn’t heard since NZ changed to decimal currency. As children we called pennies, “loos”. I subsequently found out that it was a local expression as I couldn’t find it in any Chinese dictionary and that it was a variation of the pronunciation of "nu" the word for lady. The lady being Britannia on the obverse face of the coin.

I thought “What! They don’t want clean shiny loos!? :-/ That figures, as I had taken a lot of trouble to collect clean shiny ¥1 coins but they only wanted paper money that looked like used toilet paper. I had just got rid of all the dirty paper money as bus fare the day before and now I need to keep it for buses and ferries.

Fortunately PY had some paper money. I asked him why they didn’t accept loos. He said it was because they were afraid of fakes. They were not used to using loos because they were in short supply as they were difficult and costly to mint. (This should have been a good reason to have coins to eliminate forgeries). He also said that coins were introduced only because they were needed to buy tokens for the subway systems in Guangzhou.

I was told that the heavy power transmission lines were from the nuclear power station at Daya Bay (appropriately pronounced Dire Bay) just across the border from HK.

Ferry heading back towards SunTong 新塘